Tir-na-nOg

2007/05/09: Luckily everybody thinks about the most important stuff...

Now that the departure date is drawing to a close, (only 84 days left) people slowly start wondering about the most important issues of our travel.

Ellis (for information: Vera’s sister who spends most of her time and money on buying clothes): “But if you have only one backpack, how are you going to handle taking all your clothes? And how many clothes are you going to take? Not much I guess…”

Jean-Christophe: “I was wondering about one thing during the world trip… How are we going to do it with the food?”

Luckily Superwoman is still there to take care of the really important stuff, such as booking the tickets (ok, one has to be fair, Jean-Christophe helped with this), taking care of administrative stuff , demanding visa, organising train tickets for Russia, etc.

:o)

Vera

PS: Jean-Christophe is making a small map with our future (flight-) destinations. As soon as it is finished it will be published on the website.

2007/03/27: Spring at Magical World thanks to creative geeks!

Finally it's spring. And although the weather has been quite rough still last week, it seems to be getting warmer and sunnier outside. As we all know, spring has a positive effect on all living organisms: because of the warm weather and the bigger amount of sunlight per day trees get into bloom and animals start their annual flirting-parades. We, as human beings are also concerned: we suddenly feel like we have enough energy to rule the world and typically start making plans for summer holidays.
Now within the species of the homo sapiens, there is also a quite rare one (although in the last years its apparition is increasing), the homo computeriens, in popular language also known as "geek".

Now who thinks that geeks (between them, they like to call themselves "information technologists") are guys that:

- only sit in front of their computer (scolding at it at a regular rhythm of about 6 5-minutes-cycles per hour) doing some seemingly superfluous stuff,
- especially with nice, warm weather when it would be much nicer to be walking outside,
- who only answer questions that can be answered by either 1 or 0,
- happen to exist because they have been very lucky to find a girlfriend that cooks some vegetables once in a while for them (yeah sometimes they manage quite well to hide their geeky attitude for a while and even managing to get AND keep a girlfriend)...

... is not completely wrong.

However, sometimes they also come up with some nice stuff. While surfing on the internet a bit this weekend with my little geek, we bumped into this quite nice concept that makes a graph (some kind of flower) out of any website based on its links, labels, tags, images, texts, etc. The result for www.magical-world.eu is quite nice and shown in the small picture on the side. If you want to try it for yourself with other websites, go ahead at: Websites as graphs.

Vera

PS: I bet the information technologist who created this concept, was just too much attached to his computer to go out and buy his girlfriend some real flowers, so he decided to create them from websites. That's quite cute... :o)

2007/03/04: Riddle: What did we eat today?

• Raadsel: Wat hebben we vandaag gegeten?
• Rätsel: Was haben wir heute gegessen?
• Devinette: Qu'est-ce qu'on a mangé aujourd'hui?
• Riddle: What did we eat today?

Write in a comment what you think we ate today and come over to Belfort, where we invite you to eat the same thing with us (it's very good!). :o)
To avoid spoiling the pleasure of finding the solution for the others and to allow more creativity, comments will be kept hidden until next Monday.

Vera & Jean-Christophe

PS pour Ivana et Alain: Pour vous non seulement il faut dire ce que nous avons mangé, mais aussi où est-ce qu'on l'a mangé...

Updated: The answer is: blueberry pie, tarte aux myrtilles, bosbessentaart, Blaubeerkuchen.
Those who gave the right answer can come to Belfort and we will invite you to eat a blueberry pie with us :-)

2007/02/11: Le prochain qui me demande...

"Et alors, tu es un stagiare?"

ou

"T'es dans quelle année de tes études?"

...aura le droit à une baffe...

x-(

Na!

PS: Et le même régime pour le gens qui pensent que j'ai entre 19 et 24 ans...

2007/01/19: Slight improvement of the Albums user interface

In case you did not know it: we have a photo gallery, which we call our Albums. One can access it via the tab on top of the web page called "Albums".

I recently changed it and it offers a few improvements to help you browsing through all the photos and interact with them in various ways.
First of all, once you go on the Albums page, you will see a column on the left where menus are arranged. I am going to describe the main functionality behind the Specials and Menu sections.

Specials

• Most Visited: this will display the 24 most popular pictures of all our Albums
• Best Rated: you can now rate pictures, when you display a picture, under it are some comments and the possibility for you to rate them on a scale from 0 (worst) to 5 (best). Best Rated displays the 24 best rated pictures

Menu

• Tags: For each (or almost each) picture, we took the time to add keywords (or tags). This page displays the keywords by popularity, the bigger the keyword, the more popular it is! So for example, if you want to see all the picture of "giraffes" or "lions", click the appropriate keyword and that's it.
• Comments: It displays the comments entered in the last 30 days, starting with the most recent. Nice when you have written something to check if there are some answers. ;-)

Enjoy it :-)

2007/01/18: Qu'est-ce qu'on se marre bien... :o)

Seulement 195 jours qui restent...

Jean-Christophe: "Aaaaaaahhhh!!!! On va jamais y arriver!!!!"
Superwoman: "Mais si Jean-Christophe, je suis là pour t'aider!"

Maintenant que l'on prépare avec toutes nos forces notre départ, on commence sérieusement à travailler sur notre site afin de l'améliorer (enfin... il faut quand même admettre que maintenant c'est un grand bazar plutôt inspiré des idées non-originales d'un certain informaticien et qui ne prend pas en compte les opinions et idées très originales et surtout facile à utiliser d'une certaine ergonome (qui est aussi Superwoman dans son temps libre)...).

En gros pour cela, on commence à décrire et dessiner des idées que l'on s'envoit par mail et on en discute après par Googletalk. Et qu'est-ce qu'on se marre bien des fois.

Voici un extrait de nos conversations...


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2007/01/15: For Rachel, or Why a worldtrip are not (only) holidays...

First of all: Happy New Year to everybody! That all your wishes and dreams may come true! :-)

Ever since this miraculous number "7" appeared in the signification of the current year, friends and family have been mentioning, that 2007 is for sure going to be a great year for us, as this year we are starting our trip around the world! And yes! Of course we are very excited about it also, especially as we are considering changing our departure date to the first of August, which would make that from today, exactly 200 days are left until the BIG DATE.

But what most people do not consider is that undertaking a project like that demands an important share of organization (probably more than some people get in their entire life). Now this article is especially dedicated to Rachel, who thinks that organizing and doing a world trip is "just the same thing as organizing your holidays". Let's have a look at this statement a little closer in this article.

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2006/12/22: Entretien d'embauche dans une entreprise du 21ème siècle...

Job interview in a company of the 21st century...

I like sending emails knowing that nobody will read them let alone answer them...
I like calling somebody, begging him to call me back and never be called again...
I like sending documents to colleagues for revision knowing that anyhow nobody is going to read them (or even better: nobody is going to open them)...
I like inviting people for work meetings knowing that half of the invitees is not going to show up (of course without informing me)...
I like being in work meetings for 2 hours, although we could have been able to do integrally the planned agenda in 30 minutes...
I like saying "yes and amen" to every person having a salary higher than I do...
I like doing stuff that makes absolutely no sense...

...

Well done, Miss Donk. You have the ability to work in a modern company.

2006/12/10: Jean-Christophe's Worldtrip

Finally the first (important) step for our worldtrip has been done: we bought a photo camera. Now for those of you who do not know Jean-Christophe that well, it took Vera quite some of her best conviction techniques to make him see that a worldtrip is actually a good thing because it would give him some real excuse to invest in a new, far too expensive photo camera.

To put it in his language:

"IF worldtrip
THEN photo camera"

So yesterday we went for the n-th time to a camera store "just to see what they look like". This article is a tentative to describe what went through our heads while at the store...

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2006/09/24: Bêêêêêêêrk! :-(

Avertissement!
Cet article n'est pas recommandé pour les personnes suivantes :

• Des enfants de moins de 12 ans,
• Des gens avec des problèmes cardiaques,
• Des personnes qui ne comprennent pas mon "sens de l'humour" et qui donc risquent de (com)prendre mal cet article.

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